Design engineering research · working prototypes

Two Worlds,
One Bridge

Two people describe the same place in ways that cannot both be true. A third has to build something out of what they say, and cannot ask them anything. These four instruments ask what the person in the middle does to the two talking through them — and what happens when that person is a language model.

Harvard GSD, Master in Design Engineering. The premise is Michael Reddy’s.

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What the runs found

Measured, not asserted. Every figure below comes out of a run you can reproduce by opening the piece it belongs to.

A refusal outlasts a request

One thing feared outweighs several things asked for, so the crossing that gets built is shaped more by what nobody wants than by what anybody needs. And only somebody asking can bring a ground into being: refusing a thing you fear never puts a place into the world.

The artifact barely notices the conversation

Across 360 runs the machine reached the same structure every time, while what the two of them understood of each other swung from 4 to 8 sentences misread. Phrasing is free to change how badly two people understand each other without moving one matchstick.

Deadlock and mutual courtesy look identical

Both holding firm and both giving way come out at the same place. A point survives only when exactly one of them stops arguing about it. Two people deferring to each other lose precisely what two people refusing to budge lose.

The inverse of a refusal is not a want

Of the needs one party took up on the other’s behalf, 10 of 10 did nothing for the other’s actual goal. “Not cheap and done twice” is a wish for something that lasts; the only opposite available is “a great deal of it”. The generosity is real and it arrives as bulk.

A word list loses the speaker’s stance

Reading by keyword, the machine takes 77% of sentences as meant and inverts a further 12% — a refusal of climbing filed as a request for something level. It catches what is being talked about and drops whether it is wanted or feared.

A language model loses it less, not never

With real models on all three parts, the reader took 11 of 14 sentences as meant where the word list would have agreed with it on 2. So the loss is a property of reading shallowly, not of putting a machine in the middle. The constraints are a design choice, not a law.

Nobody ever says where they are standing

In every recorded run with real models, fourteen turns of describing what they needed ended over ground nobody had described. It is the one thing the machine says, unprompted, that it does not know.

Agreeing costs what you disagree about

Made to speak with one voice, the two of them drop whatever they clash over before the machine hears any of it — and it builds from what is left. Apart, each gets what they came for. Together, a compromise that serves neither.

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The instruments

Four working pieces. Everything runs in the browser; nothing is sent anywhere.